Analyzing the Role of Community and Individual Factors in LAMP Grant Funding: Identifying Diverse Barriers Across Clustered US Counties

FAS Food Systems Impact Fellowship Capstone Project, April 2024

Author

Elliot Hohn, Sr. Agricultural Data Scientist Impact Fellow

Introduction

Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP)

The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) administers a variety of grant programs aimed at strengthening local and regional food systems. The Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP) is one such program that supports direct producer-to-consumer marketing, food enterprises, and value-added agricultural products. Established under the 2018 Farm Bill, LAMP fosters community collaboration and public-private partnerships to improve regional food economies, aiding in the development of business strategies and infrastructure for local food systems.

Promotional materials for LAMP. Image: USDA-AMS, 2024

Building community capital through food systems investment

Theory of Change

According to AMS, the main goals of the LAMP program include the following1:

  • Simplify the application processes and the reporting processes for the Program

  • Improve income and economic opportunities for producers and food businesses through job creation

  • Strengthen capacity and regional food system development through community collaboration and expansion of mid-tier value chains

Targeting / prioritizing funding

In 2021, AMS partnered with Florida A&M University and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore on a project focusing on the following goals2:

  1. Evaluate barriers to AMS grant opportunities for socially disadvantaged communities

  2. Invest in building trust and confidence between these communities and the USDA

  3. Take action to rectify inequalities in program access through targeted outreach, training, and technical assistance.

(something here about the history of discrimination in USDA programs, sowing mistrust among these communities, and potential hesitancy to partner with USDA on programs like LAMP.

Goal of this project

  • Analyze the data to see if there are relationships between community characteristics and likelihood of receiving LAMP funding

  • Generate actionable insights into improving LAMP grant targeting, identify

Caveats and such

  • Temporal component -

  • Does not include data on who applied, in addition to who was funded.

Best practices, current innovation, and policy proposals

(Identify and discuss successful program and policy models, emerging and innovative approaches, or other proposed interventions relevant to the issue area.)

Objectives of this research

Methods

(TBD)

Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP)

The LAMP program’s main goals3 are:

  • Connect and cultivate regional food economies through public-private partnerships.

  • Support the development of business plans, feasibility studies, and strategies for value-added agricultural production and local and regional food system infrastructure.

  • Strengthen capacity and regional food system development through community collaboration and expansion of mid-tier value chains.

  • Improve income and economic opportunities for producers and food businesses through job creation; and

  • Simplify the application processes and the reporting processes for the Program.

The major grant programs within LAMP include the Local Food Promotion Program (LFPP), Regional Food Systems Partnership (RFSP), and the Farmers Market Promotion Program (FMPP).

Distribution of LAMP Grant funding across CONUS

Community characteristics

Participation in grant programs supporting investment in local food systems, such as LAMP, is influenced by a variety of socioeconomic and environmental factors that influence local needs, as well as local capacity to apply for grants and manage funded projects. Community wealth, which encompasses social capital, natural capital, financial capital, and a variety of other forms of wealth impacts the ability to engage and participate in such programs.4 Moreover, things like poverty and food insecurity rates have been shown to exacerbate vulnerabilities and influence accessibility and participation in programs.5 With food systems-focused programs such as LAMP, urbanization and proximity to agricultural land can influence market dynamics and food system connectivity.6

This report will assess the relationship of each of these community characteristics to the distribution of LAMP grants across the US.

Exploration of available data

As a first step, a variety of data sets were obtained, cleaned, and used for some general data exploration.

Indicators of community wealth

Exploratory map of community wealth data

Dimension reduction with PCA

Started with 44 variables, which were reduced to 10 using a principal components analysis.

Principal components

Community characteristics

Infrastructure
  • part of this data comes from Schmitt et al - the PCs developed in that paper

  • the other variables come from … somewhere else?

Plot of wealth indices vs Award Amounts

Urban-Rural continuum data

This information can be used to control for the location of each county in relation to rural (and potentially agricultural) land.

Underserved communities

From Consumer Financial Bureau data

Poverty

Ag land

Combine data

Cluster analysis

Cluster exploration

Dimension reduction

Use principal component analysis (PCA) to reduce dimensionality of datasets and retain only most important information.

Regression

Footnotes

  1. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/lamp. Accessed April 20, 2024↩︎

  2. https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/MSDUSDAAMSGrantApplicantTASociallyDisadvantaged.pdf↩︎

  3. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/grants/lamp↩︎

  4. Flora, Cornelia Butler, Jan L. Flora, and Stephen P. Gasteyer. Rural Communities: Legacy and Change. 4th ed. Routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429494697.↩︎

  5. Alisha Coleman-Jensen, Matthew P. Rabbitt, Christian A. Gregory, and Anita Singh. 2021. Household Food Security in the United States in 2020, ERR-298, U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service.↩︎

  6. Pothukuchi, Kameshwari, and Jerome L. Kaufman. “The Food System: A Stranger to the Planning Field.” Journal of the American Planning Association 66, no. 2 (June 30, 2000): 113–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944360008976093.↩︎